Joseph Wambaugh, the master storyteller of police dramas, whose books, films and television tales powerfully caught the hard psychic realities of lonely street cops and flawed detectives trapped in a seedy world of greed and senseless brutality, died on Friday at his home in Rancho Mirage, Calif. Read more
Month: February 2025
When Your Thoughts Brand You a Criminal, How Can You Get Free?
In Laila Lalami’s latest novel, a woman’s dreams put her into detention. Read more
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Six Older Books That Deserve to Be Popular Today
Happily, unfairly forgotten treasures are in vogue. Major publishers and small presses are reissuing novels long out of print, exhuming unpublished manuscripts from celebrated writers, and championing unpopular works dismissed for their abstraction or difficulty. Reading can offer the delightful opportunity to find your present-day thoughts, worries, and emotions in a book published before you were even born. These books may also change how you think about the past, or feature prose you’d never encounter in contemporary life. The following titles are only a small selection that have, in recent years, through the efforts of obsessive editors and fans alike, found themselves justifiably rescued from oblivion. Read more
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James Tilly Matthews and the Air Loom
James Tilly Matthews was delusional. He believed that secret gangs of people were operating across London, using a bizarre machine called the “Air Loom” to control his thoughts and those of others from a distance. According to Matthews, this device emitted “magnetic fluids” to manipulate minds and was being wielded by spies to influence political decisions. Read more
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M Is for Mortality: Lessons from Edward Gorey on His Hundredth Birthday
Gorey said, “I write about everyday life.” His work reminds us that death is a major fact of existence. Read more
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First Known Cookbook by a Black American Woman Gets New Edition 160 Years Later
Malinda Russell wrote A Domestic Cookbook: Containing a Careful Selection of Useful Receipts for the Kitchen in 1866. We know sadly little about her, says Rafia Zafar, a retired professor at Washington University in St Louis, Mo., who contributed a foreword to the new edition. Read more
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The Badass Lady Pilot Who Revolutionized the Art of Food Writing
With a name like Clementine Paddleford, she should have been unforgettable. So why don’t you know who she is? Read more
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Jane Austen Fans Honor British Novelist’s Legacy 250 Years After Her Birth
This year, fans of the British romantic novelist Jane Austen are celebrating 250 years since her birth. In her homeland of England, residents are expecting a tourist boom. Watch video
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Antifascist, Feminist, Timeless: On Alba de Céspedes’s ‘There’s No Turning Back’
There’s No Turning Back follows eight young women living in a convent-boarding house in Rome, most of whom are studying at the university. They come from different backgrounds, have different desires and goals, and make different choices, yet they are united in the task of finding their way in the world. “It’s as if we’re on a bridge,” one of the girls says. “We’ve already departed from one side and haven’t yet reached the other. What we’ve left behind we don’t look back at. What awaits us is still enveloped in fog. We don’t know what we’ll find when the fog clears.” Read more
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Tom Robbins, Whose Comic Novels Drew a Cult Following, Dies at 92
Tom Robbins, whose cosmically comic novels about gargantuan-thumbed hitchhikers, stoned secret agents and mystic stockbrokers caught hold of millions of readers in the 1970s counterculture, died on Sunday at his home in La Conner, Wash. Read more
